Metastable and spin-polarized states in electron systems with localized electron–electron interaction

•A metastable state arises in the electron system when pair interaction is localized.•In the metastable state, the system can be both spin polarized and unpolarized.•Critical conditions for the metastable state to appear are studied.•Electron cloud around the interaction region affects the metastable state energy.

We study the formation of spontaneous spin polarization in inhomogeneous electron systems with pair interaction localized in a small region that is not separated by a barrier from surrounding gas of non-interacting electrons. Such a system is interesting as a minimal model of a quantum point contact in which the electron–electron interaction is strong in a small constriction coupled to electron reservoirs without barriers. Based on the analysis of the grand potential within the self-consistent field approximation, we find that the formation of the polarized state strongly differs from the Bloch or Stoner transition in homogeneous interacting systems. The main difference is that a metastable state appears in the critical point in addition to the globally stable state, so that when the interaction parameter exceeds a critical value, two states coexist. One state has spin polarization and the other is unpolarized. Another feature is that the spin polarization increases continuously with the interaction parameter and has a square-root singularity in the critical point. We study the critical conditions and the grand potentials of the polarized and unpolarized states for one-dimensional and two-dimensional models in the case of extremely small size of the interaction region.

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